001 // Two-Year College Writing Studies: Rationale and Praxis for Just Teaching, edited by Darin Jensen and Brett Griffiths.
Hi, friends. If you're reading this, you've stumbled upon the little blog I made to keep track of my thoughts during the reading year of my PhD in English Rhetoric and Composition. The plan is for there to be one hundred posts, each one corresponding to a book on my reading list. I'm starting this in January of 2024, and I hope to take my exams in September, so in theory, this project will be done by then. There's no real end goal with this beyond recording my own reading process, but it would be neat if anyone finds this interesting enough to follow along.
One of my primary areas on my reading list is focused on writing pedagogy at access-oriented institutions, so where better to start than Darin Jensen and Brett Griffiths' new book, Two-Year College Writing Studies: Rationale and Praxis for Just Teaching (Utah State University Press, 2023)? I was really hyped for this book to come out, and after racing through it in just a few days, I can confidently say that it does not disappoint. This feels very much like a "greatest hits" compilation from some of the most influential voices in the two-year college writing studies world right now. It's got Patrick Sullivan talking about the democratic mandate of community colleges, Emily Suh talking about supporting Gen. 1 learners' identities in the first-year writing classroom, Joanne Baird Giordano and Holly Hassel talking about the precarity of two-year college writing programs in an era of institutional and legislative austerity, and so much more, including the editors' introduction and conclusion, which are absolute bangers—the book is worth the cost of admission for these sections alone.
The writing is easy to read (no overwrought academic prose here!), even if you're not well-versed in the topics at hand, and there's a nice balance of theory and practical application (or rationale and praxis, as the title puts it) in each chapter. If I had read this book before my first term teaching at a community college, I would have found my footing a lot sooner, and even now, four years into it, I found something useful in every chapter. Even if you're not a two-year college person, I think you'd find a lot of value in this compact and accessible volume.
I have a feeling I'll be missing this book in a month or two when I'm wading through some dense theoretical texts. For now, I'm sticking with the friendly faces are recent books—Shane A. Wood's Teachers Talking Writing: Perspectives on Places, Pedagogies, and Programs is up next.
Until next time,
RCWY